Death before Dishonour

Above Dzorwulu, the sky becomes thick with bats.  I was running when I first saw the flock overhead, black and winged like birds. If I had not heard the story, I would have imagined them crows.

The chief came from a village north of Accra, wounded or ill. I do not know which. He came in bad health and he did not return. The bats followed overhead as he was carried to 37 Hospital. They could not spot his body carried out in a Hearst. They remained and painted the roof of the building with white feces.  Military police brought rifles, aimed into the trees and shot the flock as it scattered. The bats returned each morning. Eventually, patients whined about the racket. An animal shelter wrote to the state and spoke to a newspaper. The bats were allowed to stay.

I don’t know if it is the memory of the bullets that scatters them north as the sun deepens, a copper blossom in the sky. I wonder if they search the space between the sinking warmth and the early risen moon. In the dry season, the spheres sit together through the afternoon like sisters. A reminder of the poles. Of polarity. Of change.

It was not chance that I looked up and saw their flight from the east towards the hills of Aburi. I had been looking down, following my breath as I ran the back streets near my home. Three young boys stopped me. One had lowered himself into the open sewer to play. Another was following. The third waited near the curb, his nose pointed to the sky.  I stopped to scold them, to coax them from the green sewage. As they withdrew to the roadside, they lifted their faces to the flock. My eyes followed and I remembered Jihad’s words.

“It’s true,” he said. “It is not just a story.” I scoffed and set my mouth to my bottle. Embarrassed for the part of myself that believed him. Embarrassed for the part of myself that didn’t. The dog began barking. Someone suggested we swim. We swam. Ate barracuda. Watched as the night came black as the river. We were far from the city. I looked for the trail of his story, but the sky was flightless.  Maybe it was strange that I expected to see the story materialize over the lake. Not more absurd, though, than our presence on the island.

Karla had run over the hot sand, a barracuda swinging from her left hand. She had helped pull in the nets, and the villagers had given her a share of the catch. It was her broad smile that made the two men laugh and invite us to the island.  I bit my lip when one introduced himself as Jihad. We piled into a white boat and headed across the estuary.

It was not their home, we realized after we arrived. It belonged to a man whose name wasn’t given. He wore shorts and a blue t-shit, screened with petals and the avowal “Death before Dishonour”. He did not say much, but smiled and welcomed us. After lunch he went for siesta. I asked Jihad what he did for a living and he laughed, paused, then mentioned something about a factory.

There was gin. It got late. We stayed to watch football. Italians arrived with prosciutto. We stayed and ate dinner. There was rum. Imported vodka. A shower that ran with fresh water. A brick pizza oven. A drawer filled with cartons of cigarettes. Air conditioning in empty rooms. Thick green grass. Jet skis. We were fascinated.

It was after midnight when we drove back over the water to our camp. A few glass lanterns still sat on the tables, flinching in the wind. I slept heavy with meat and alcohol, barely noticing the rustle at the foot of the bed. In the morning, I found my bag of apples gnawed by rodents. The sand floor of my cabin was tracked with claws. But the morning glowed through spaces in the palm leaf walls, as if I sat inside a basket in a city of light. The ocean sang in my right ear.  The current of the Volta river swam in my left. Held in the soft gravity between them, I could barely breathe for fear I would slip from the center of those winds.

Poetry & Pema Chodron

“If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility.That’s the true practice of peace.”     – Pema Chodron

I am thankful for the parcel that just arrived with this piece of advice. I thought I would share it. Another piece of advice: If one of her books ever appear in your life pay attention to them. I’m yet to meet a person unaffected by her words.

I am standing and eating and laughing again. I think I showed malaria a thing or two. It wasn’t fun. But I’ve earned my stripes. Time is passing quickly. Only five weeks left in this city. Months before I come home, but still. I am only settling, I think sometimes. Although there are other mornings when the regularity of everything seems absurd. The tro tro like a streetcar. The dogs like racoons, sewers like hedges. I even shiver some nights.

I have added new poetry to a subsection of the blog. Go and find her if you’d like some new stories. I am working on at series built from the headlines of Ghanaian tabloids, hence the one titled “Security Officer becomes Turtle”. Enjoy!

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This blessing called rain

This city is always breathing, but in rain
you hear the tepid exhale like a single wind
passing your earlobe.

The skeleton of the bus rattles.
There is music in the clatter of falling.
Hands sweep from open iron,
leather slaps grate.

A man sings psalms down the aisle,
his hands deep in the leather of the book.
He does not slip when we shift westward.

Beneath tin and water, his audience is passive,
humming to their breasts and sipping moisture.
He deepens his breath and breaks louder,
turns to the ear of a young man.

The orange peelers arrive and sell fruit
through the windows. The mother beside me
splits one with two fingers and offers me half.

Even the preacher lowers his book to accept
a quarter. His lips are wet when he resumes singing.

James Town, this brown city, gives more than it can take.

 

Bra, Obroni, Bra!

They drop me near He Is Alive chop bar and I walk the rest of the way. I know the currents now; how to fall in pace with the suits and elder women, cross roads without injury. I respond to Jennifer, Ashley, Hilary. White lady names. Etiquette dictates that I say hello when these are shouted at me. I still don’t respond to Obroni. I watch my footwork and imagine the slur hasn’t reached me. I want to tell them that I know. That I haven’t forgotten. That their  brother shouted the same thing just ten meters back. But Hey. They’ve got a right to state the obvious. Especially when it’s not meant to be offensive.

It’s the Canadian in me that makes me coquettish, red-faced and bumbling when I’m hissed at, grabbed by the elbow, called names of sitcom characters or implicated for my color. D. saw me trying to breathe through one of these moments and said she understood the feeling. “But it’s not rude,” she added, reminding me to look at the intention. Her words brought me instead to the question of language.

English is braided into my memory. I’m too familiar with these words to forget their meaning. When a man hisses in my direction my palm itches. He’s selling ice cream for a quarter, and I’m all bells and whistles. Righteously pissed off like only a foreigner could be. I came here expecting to understand, to be understood. Put me in Guatemala, Timbuktu, Ouagadougou: I expect the separation. I spend half my day trying to sort through my lack of knowledge, move past the freshly-conjugated-verb stage of I am Thirst, I want Hungry, Where is you?  Here, I rarely remember to annunciate.  I can’t hear my own thick accent. Which is not to say my words get lost. Not to say my conversations drop after the first line. It’s to explain that sometimes I have firm footing and then all of a sudden I’m treading water. Like there are wells in this language.  Depths you can fall into while riding a tro-tro to Circle, asking you neighbour where they grew up. And Yes I do mean the big C. Colonialism. The foundation of our relationship to these words.

I would like to implicate myself in a know-it-allism of Proper Language Use. When I see a sign reading “Both Sexes Heavy Nail Salon” I assume that it is wrong. I sometimes even have a chuckle. In reality, this is a natural hybridity. A evolution of the language. My ingrained sense of proper spelling, proper grammar, is a British Right and Wrong. An adopted attitude of my country, and one leashed to issues of class and ethnicity. Which is not to suggest that proper language use is determined by either of these issues, but to imply that it is often moralized along these lines. “Bad” speech is a sign of poor education. Many individuals from rural communities in developing countries have low levels of literacy. Do these suggestions sound familiar? I believe there is some truth to them. But if we widen our frame of reference, this “truth” becomes very subjective.

Local use of a language may differ from what is taught in schools, but where textbook English cannot get you on the bus, through a cue or home with the right bags of groceries, these “deviations” are practical adaptations that improve efficiency, clarity and understanding. Maintaining a Eurocentric sense of linguistic hierarchy involves disregarding both the intention and function of variations.

Understandings of literacy can be similarly problematic. If we mark the ability to process and express purely against reading and writing skills, we find ourselves with a set of global statistics that are of serious concern.  I am not debating the accuracy or importance of this concern.  I want to suggest that if we discuss literacy from a pluralistic standpoint, we end up with a different result. A widened definition recognizes the multiple literacies that exist globally, including oral communication, practical skills like farming and artistic traditions such as craft and performance. The universal application of this understanding  not only alters literacy stats in so-called developing countries. It has a substantial levelling effect on the “First World”. How many people do you know who can raise crops?

Does this mean that formal education is less important in places where non-institutionalized education is taking place? I would say not. I believe that formal education has a important, positive affect on personal development and can contribute to improved health and economic standing. But who am I to say? Formal education may not contribute to an individual’s security, in the short or long term. A friend working for the UN Sierra Leone recently told me of the sexual violence faced by young girls and women attempting to begin their education as the country transitions towards peace. Once pregnant, these young women they are no longer able to attend school. They are targeted for this specific reason.

I also wonder if the promotion of some literacies is coming at the cost of others. Are individuals forced to choose between the traditional skills of their community, such as farming and performance, and improvement in their reading and writing skills? Again, I don’t know the answer to this. I expect that many individuals simply forsake sleep and work harder than I have in my life trying to maintain both. I also expect that environmental pressures and the landscape of the global economy are making it even more difficult. As the dry season gets drier and it gets harder to grow crops, the relative price of these crops has fallen lower than ever before. But will book smarts break this cycle of poverty when there are no jobs for the educated class either?

Where literacy in its strict definition is often used as a measure of intelligence, this broadened understanding suggests that literacy rates may be more indicative of the extent to which a society has adapted to the new social structures of neo/colonialism. This adaptation may not be preferential. Adaptation may mean structural adjustment programs. It may mean agreeing to the very trade agreements that make farming financially unviable in agricultural states.  It may mean acting against your own personal security. Which is not, I suggest, the most intelligent move in all cases.

I encounter hundreds of entrepreneurs each day in this city, without exaggeration. Every road, walkway, corner, alleyway is a marketplace. Most people own their business. I do not expect they find it easy to feed themselves at the end of the day.  Selling striped pieces of sugar cane can only bring you so much income, especially when there are ten other women with the same wares down the street. The act is still one of resourcefulness, of strategy. I may flinch at the brusqueness used to call me forward, to draw my attention. I may not want to be invited to examine jewellery yet again.  But the strength of the informal sector is a sign of strength and persistence I am not familiar with. That I hope to learn from. When  I am called out for my color (Bra, Obroni, Bra!- come, come here), it is not just the politics of race. It’s the economic literacy of a population that recognizes I Likely Have A Greater Disposable Income. Which is true.

There are times when I can’t fight it and a stream of adjectives flow fluently under my breath. Don’t touch me, stop, stop, I don’t want it. Forgetting associations is not like removing an item of clothing. I am hard wired to be vocal, to throw a middle finger at a man who crosses a line, to not answer yes when some guy says he “wants to be my friend”. But at the same time, I have to admit that this is my fault and my problem. Cross-cultural understanding is a game you are suppose to loose when you enter a new country. We’ve anglicized industry, trade, global politics. Thank God we haven’t managed to adopt all the streets.

I am learning, slowly. In front of Lady in Red I catch tro-tros by rotating my open palm in a circle. When taxi’s honk incessantly,  slowing down without my request, I can send them off with a certain shake of my head, wave of my fingers. I walk smiling like an idiot through every intersection so my silence is not seen  as rude, just foolish. And when my neighbours ask me: “Etesen, Obroni?” I can even mangle their language in response:  “Me ho ye, Me ho ye, Me dasi.” I am fine, I am fine, Thank-you.

I’m not waiting for the sky to open

All this talk of business and no talk of blessings. I wish different words had been spun from my mouth this past month. But sometimes holidays are hurricanes -and then, I didn’t come here for a holiday, either.

Some days I walk these streets and my body can’t take it -all the smells and colors and hot winds, meat on sticks and bowls of raw fish. Some days the purple of Kente makes me nauseous. But this comes from a bruise that formed upon arrival. I find myself walking through Kaneshie motor park silently scolding myself for not opening up my arms and hugging every person trying to sell me biscuits.

It’s not that I am waiting for the sky to open; it’s that some days it does.

On those days the morning light is like silk, and I wake soft with possibility. In such such open skies I brown with out burning, taste water like sweet milk, and inevitably find myself at the Arts centre pounding a djembe or learning Ga dances on the Accra shore line. There is beauty in this city. Buckets full of it. So much that sometimes I feel like drowning and can’t catch breath. I think this excess, this harlem of color and taste, may be the root of my anxiety. My eyes don’t know how to filter. My tongue doesn’t know how to breathe. Thankfully, I seem to still know something about learning…

~

In Hotel Ado-do, ABANTU brings fourty women of the District Assemblies and they speak of how they fought for election, how their relationships with men have changed, how they managed all this while running farms, shops, families. And I realize how much we need these strategies. How far we are from representation and meaningful change in our country. Feminism may no longer be a dirty word, but it seems to have lost much of it’s popular meaning. I’ve been told we don’t need it anymore by many a man and many a woman. Where feminism is the recognition that we live under a global system of patriarchy, I’m not sure what these individuals are referencing. Can we be represented without representation? How engaged are we if Status of Women Canada been shut down as silently as it recently was?

What I’m saying: We need more women in politics. ABANTU’s strategies are not complicated. They are not expensive to implement. They offer direct training, education and support to women who want to run for local government. They bring these women together and form networks, women’s caucuses, mobilized groups that can respond to policy threats and continue to support new women who want to move into the political arena. I’m not saying the identical strategy would work in Canada. The success of this project is dependant on two factors present in Ghanaian politics that are absent in Canada -a system of local government (district assemblies) that allows for greater participation and representation, and (my own conjecture) the presence of visible, recognized threats to the status of women.

By this, I am not insinuating that we are without threats in Canada. Our country is a landmark in the UN sanctioned “16 days of action against Gender Violence”. It is hard to pretend we have moved far from the Montreal Massacre when we remember the devastation at Dawson College last fall, or when we look at our rates of domestic violence. Despite the reality that many women in our country face, these threats remain largely unrecognized, both popularly and politically. Our crown speeches don’t reference the gendered nature of issues. And our country doesn’t shout loudly about their absence. There are many groups that are trying, but until it’s naturally amplified in our own minds, these voices will grow sore screaming solo.

Are we less mobilized because we are closer to equality ? Or are our experiences fragmented enough that we no longer realize we all need to fight for equal access to resources, representation and respect? Change can happen through collective action, persistence and raised voices. In fact, it’s the only way it does. The newly passed Domestic Violence Act is proof of this in Ghana. There is still a lot of work to be done, but there seem to be open channels for moving forward. Reflecting on the locked doors and shut windows Harper has held up to half our country, I’m feeling less optimistic about Canada.

So where do we start? At the risk of repeating myself, my only answer is this: If silence is the problem, that voice may be the answer. We need to move past our complacency in order to become mobilized. And first, we need to know what we’re facing.
~

Final words of gratitude to every last one of you who sent out some love when my words were waxing into darkness. I’m in a new home, nee north kaneshie, nee hotel diamond palace; here I walk into the pantry freely and like the smell of the bed sheets. And I have a wondrous invention called a key, that will ensure I’m not stranded on the street for a second time. I hope y’all have an adventurous holiday, with more mashed potatoes than turkey, and more love than stockings.

Tears by the fistfull.

I cried in front of the laundress. In front of the doctor. The taxi driver, waving his hand in front of my covered eyes. I wore sun glasses to hide it and wet them from the inside. It was like seeing through lake water. In the bathroom, I cried reaching for the paper than on a high shelf. Lying on the floor of my bedroom, facing plaster. Over my computer while it played Bob Dylan. Until I couldn’t tell my tears from sweat. For two days I cried like I was ripe fruit -ready to burst under the touch of wind, let alone hands, teeth, or knife.

Even the vacillation of the fan moved something in me.

Outside there are lizards. A garden of them. Lizards that could wrap your wrist like jewellery. Lizards that could fit in the groove of a women’s clavicle. Lizards whose splayed bodies burst red in the tail. A certain breed that dance their torsos up and down before scattering beneath your feet.

Their bodies are compass points.  On the brown wall that marks this yard they travel West. When I stand on the porch to brush my teeth I pick them out from the clay. The geckos follow the larger ones. It is harder to find the chameleons. This doesn’t surprise me. I want to know where they are headed. Maybe it’s just to the plantain shoots at the edge of the property.  Maybe it’s a smell that pulls them.

One day in Vancouver a Mexican woman told me about the Four Directions. She said Shamans believe South is the path of destruction, the path of rebirth. I told her about a moment of silence I had on a cleft of rock in Guatemala. About vomiting after church in Chiapas. Coming home thin, with so much shed that I didn’t want to eat my mother’s cooking. The world spun between our tongues like marbles. I left that sun bathed hill like a woman who had just learned her own name.

I don’t remember what she said about the West.  I don’t think she mentioned the smell of plantain. It must be more than instinct that has carried me this distance. I must be here to do more than spin buckets of tears. Than count geckos. Than brush teeth and spit white paste on green leaves each morning.

There are women I have come here to help. But they are my mothers, escorting me through hospital cues and buying me alarm clocks that break daily. I am like a giant Canadian wound that needs milk. A lost Obroni with a mandate. For hire written across my forehead. Let me help you, please, I need help. I can’t ask without giving. I can’t give without asking.  Maybe it’s tied aid. Maybe it’s tied love. Maybe it’s just us, sitting there eating Fufu and groundnut soup, discussing the weather. Maybe it’s just a bottomless pit of humanity beneath all our mistakes and good intentions. Maybe I’m just dead set on diving in it. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop crying; all this fucking humanity, all our grand imperfections, and my own inability to swim, let alone build a dam against this tide.

But then, maybe I am being melodramatic. I grew up with a full belly. I’ve spent many years searching for new sources of hunger.